More than 85% of K-3 classes in Alberta's big city school districts fail to meet size targets

In the booming south Edmonton neighbourhood of Rutherford, library shelves have been pushed into the atrium and hallways of Monsignor Fee Otterson Catholic School to make room for its youngest students.

When the school ran out of classrooms, principal Marie Whelan’s fix was to gather about 40 kindergartners in one large space with plenty of supervision — two teachers and an educational assistant.

“Everybody would appreciate a smaller class size; I think that’s just human nature,” Whelan said. “But you can work with a larger enrolment in your classrooms as well, if you have the right supports in place.”

More than fifteen years after Alberta’s ballooning class sizes became a flashpoint in an acrimonious teachers’ strike, tales of classes that start the year with more students than desks remain common.

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Parents speak of children competing for teachers’ attention, while teachers in turn struggle to meet dozens of students’ complex needs.

All this is despite high-profile class-size targets on the books and at least $2.7 billion of taxpayers’ money provided since 2004 to hire teachers and meet those goals.

In five of Alberta’s largest school districts, more than 85 per cent of the kindergarten to Grade 3 classes are larger than government-recommended averages, new data obtained by Postmedia shows.

It’s not much better in high schools. Freedom of information requests to school districts in Edmonton, Red Deer and Calgary revealed 47 teens were grouped together in math and physics classes for at least part of the 2017-18 school year in two Calgary high schools. A Grade 9 French class in Calgary’s Colonel Macleod School had 46 kids, and there were math and science classes of 45 and 44 at Edmonton’s Eastglen High School.

As class-size averages creep up in all grades, requests for more in-depth class-size details show nearly a third of Calgary public high school classes have 35 or more students. In Edmonton Public Schools, four times as many classes have 36 or more students as compared with 2005. Both school districts charged Postmedia hundreds of dollars in fees to release this information.

Parents, educators and experts who have seen the data used words like ridiculous, alarming and disheartening to describe it.

“The priority is not the students,” said Louise Sevigny, an Edmonton parent whose daughter is in a Grade 2 class of 31. “The priority is the system. And it’s the people who are running it. It’s not on the children.”

Off target

Alberta’s class-size targets are rooted in the recommendations of the Alberta Commission on Learning (ACOL). Following the 2002 teachers’ strike, the Ralph Klein government agreed to appoint an independent task force to study the state of K-12 education. It was an olive branch to teachers, who said some class sizes had become unmanageable.

The commission found the concern was widespread. Pointing to research on the benefits of smaller classes, one of its notable recommendations called for school districts to meet the following average class sizes:

• Kindergarten to Grade 3 — 17 students

• Grade 4-6 — 23 students

• Grade 7-9 — 25 students

• Grade 10-12 — 27 students

Some felt the commission didn’t go far enough. They heard from people who wanted class-size caps, as existed at the time in Quebec, New Brunswick and Ontario. The commissioners wanted to give school districts flexibility. Students with disabilities, living in poverty, or learning English, for example, should be in classes smaller than the guidelines, the commission said. It wanted districts to report class-size averages annually, and to explain why they hit or missed targets.

The guidelines were one of 95 recommendations to bolster the education system, and among 86 the government accepted.

Patricia Mackenzie, a former Edmonton city councillor who chaired the commission, said in a recent interview the panel didn’t want to hamstring schools with firm caps that might restrict students’ access to classes, or force administrators to split classes that were one or two children over the limit.

Although the teachers’ strike pushed the issue of class size to the fore, what made a difference was parents’ calls for classrooms where teachers had the time for one-on-one interactions, Mackenzie said.

In July 2004, then-learning minister Lyle Oberg announced the government would spend $350 million in three years to hire 2,265 more teachers and get class sizes to the new guidelines by the 2006-07 school year.

“We said, ‘You have to target these numbers as a jurisdiction,’ ” Oberg said last month from Kelowna, B.C., where he now lives. “We recognize that there’s going to be outliers for a reason. But these are the numbers that we want you to aim toward for your jurisdiction.”

By fall 2006, average class sizes in Grades 4-12 were below the commission’s guidelines, and kept falling until about 2009. Keeping K-3 classes at 17 or below proved trickier — the average class size bottomed out at 18.2 students in 2008.

By 2010, Alberta had gained 2,900 teachers in six years. The government changed the class size initiative (CSI) funds to focus only on lowering K-3 and high school trades classes. School districts no longer had to report how they spent money meant to keep classes small.

The momentum reversed, and averages have crept up slowly in all grades since.

“It’s like boiling the frog — you know that old cliché,” said Larry Booi, past Alberta Teachers’ Association president who led teachers during the 2002 strike. “Nobody notices for a little while, but if you look back after a five-, or a six-, or a 10-year period, and you say, ‘How did it get this way?’

“The way it got that way was government chronically underfunding classrooms so that school boards took the easy route, and they simply increased class sizes.”

Education Minister David Eggen said the commission’s guidelines still apply to classrooms today. He wants class sizes to drop, particularly in the early years, he said in a May interview.

Oberg, Mackenzie and Booi say the ACOL targets are as relevant today as they were in 2003, especially for the youngest students.

“Everybody concedes that in that K-3 area, you’ve got to have those classrooms really small if teachers are to do their best work and kids are to have a really good start,” Booi said.

Why class size matters

Educators and researchers generally agree the number of pupils gathered before each teacher can affect students’ quality of education. Where they differ is on how important class size is compared with other factors: Is the teacher good at her job? How many other professionals are working in the room? What are the needs of the students before them?

Studying the effect of class size — and only class size — on student success is complex. Students aren’t lab mice, and it’s unethical to purposefully assign them to large classes if researchers expect it to negatively affect their education.

The state-sponsored research project recruited 11,500 K-3 students and 1,300 teachers and randomly assigned them to both small- and medium-sized classes between 1985 and 1989.

STAR’s rigorous design gave researchers confidence in pointing to small class size as the cause of better outcomes for kids, particularly in the lower grades, Daniels said.

It found students in classes of 13 to 17 pupils outperformed students in classes of 22 to 25 on standardized tests, regardless of whether the bigger class had a teacher’s aide. The gains for small-class students were near-equal in math and reading, and children in the smaller classes were less likely to repeat a grade.

Although smaller classes gave all students an advantage, the improvement was most substantial for minority and marginalized students.

Teachers with the small classes reported juggling fewer behavioural problems, more time for individual student attention and better knowledge of each child’s strengths and limitations.

Followup research found the benefits of those small classes in the K-3 years persisted into higher grades, were linked to higher graduation rates, and led to more success as adults.

U of A researcher Daniels says given the evidence, large class sizes should bother the public. Unlike a student’s income level or first language, class size is a factor schools can control and change, she said.

Large classes can also be impractical, like when there aren’t enough microscopes or textbooks to go around. When kindergarten teachers are so busy helping 30 kids get coats on and off, there’s little time left to teach them how to hold a pencil, Daniels said.

Class size itself isn’t the problem, Daniels emphasizes — it’s a factor that can contribute to students falling behind their classmates, or lagging social-emotional development.

“If everybody was learning just fine, and becoming nice, kind people, and meeting all the curricular outcomes we wanted, we probably wouldn’t care about class sizes,” she said.

Some measures suggest all Alberta students are not “learning just fine.”

About a quarter of Grade 6 and 9 students failed provincial achievement tests last year. Parents have raised concerns about students’ results on international tests in reading, writing, math and science. In 2016, 54 per cent of self-identified Indigenous students graduated, compared with 78 per cent of all 12th graders.

How we got here

A decade ago, all school districts were meeting class size average guidelines for high school, 96 per cent were meeting junior high school guidelines, 92 per cent met Grade 4-6 targets, and nearly a quarter were hitting the tricky-to-achieve K-3 goals, according to numbers compiled by Alberta’s auditor general.

Yet, despite provincial spending targeting class size, school boards have moved further away from those targets in every grade grouping — especially in the elementary years.

What happened? How did 76 eighth graders end up in one gym class in Red Deer’s Normandeau School? How did Calgary Catholic Schools tally 39 high school classes of 39 students this fall?

One factor was Alberta’s robust economy.

“It’s a good time to have children when things are looking up economically,” said Frank Trovato, a demographer and professor of sociology at the U of A.

There was a baby boom. In 2008, Albertans were having 14.1 babies for every 1,000 residents — a crude birth rate that was the highest of the 10 provinces. Those children are now nine and 10 years old.

Alberta also has a relatively young population compared to other provinces, with a larger cohort of people in their child-bearing years, Trovato said. The province has been a magnet for economic migrants and immigrants, many of whom brought children.

After years of stagnation, the number of children enrolled in Alberta schools started to balloon by 2008. By last September, there were 685,378 K-12 students in the province — a 20 per cent spike from a decade earlier.

Principals in some schools say even if they could afford to hire more teachers to make classes smaller, they’d have nowhere to put them.

The conditions now

Data obtained through freedom of information requests showed some Alberta students were in high school math classes of more than 40 students in September 2017.CHAD HUCULAK

Rising enrolment and teacher staffing levels are statistics the Alberta Teachers’ Association has tracked over the years. Alberta needs 2,139 more teachers on the job to bring class sizes to where they were in 2007, president Greg Jeffery said in an interview last month. Assuming about $90,000 annually in salary and benefits for a new teacher, that could cost $193 million a year.

With more students who require different kinds of help, most of whom are integrated into typical classrooms, class sizes matter more than ever, Jeffery said.

The proportion of students who need help with English, for example, has skyrocketed. In 2004, seven per cent of students at Edmonton Public Schools were English language learners. Today, it’s 23 per cent.

Jeffery worries about crowding in classrooms, which means kids are more likely to come into conflict. He frets about teachers handling “untenable” workloads and leaving the profession. When teachers don’t have the time to build relationships with students, they’re less likely to notice problems.

Last fall, the association started its “My Class Size Is” campaign to draw attention to the issue. Teachers across Alberta filled out yellow and green cards listing the number of students in their classes, what grade they taught, how many kids in the class have complex needs and how it compared with the commission’s guidelines. Teachers and ATA locals posted pictures of the cards on Twitter and Facebook and presented MLAs with stacks of them.

The ATA followed up with an Environics survey in March, which found 80 per cent of Albertans would support an increase to education funding to make class sizes smaller. They also found 86 per cent of respondents would support class-size caps.

Lowering class sizes within school districts’ current budgets would require trade-offs — sacrifices some leaders say they’re unwilling to make.

Red Deer Public Schools’ superintendent Stu Henry says the base funding the government allots school districts per pupil has remained unchanged, despite inflation driving up costs.

“We’d have to sacrifice positions like learning assistance teachers, many of our education assistants, mental health therapists, counsellors,” Henry said in a May interview. “I just think, based on what we’re hearing from our parents, our students and our staff members, that’s a bigger priority to them than class size.”

He says he wants both smaller classes and extra support for students who have learning disorders, mental health challenges and other barriers to learning.

Calgary Catholic Schools works to keep class sizes “reasonable,” but it’s one of many competing priorities, spokeswoman Joanna French said last month.

“Equally important to class size is the composition of classrooms and meeting the needs of our students and providing a foundation for our diverse learners,” she said.

Several school district spokespeople said the class-size counts done in the fall represent a snapshot in time of a dynamic environment. Some principals will juggle their budgets or get district permission after the count to hire more teachers and split large classes in two.

How many students in one classroom is too many? No district officials interviewed for this story wanted to specify a number.

“It’s not a hard and fast rule,” said Robert Martin, assistant superintendent of district operations and IT at Edmonton Catholic Schools.

‘Hard to manage’

There are plenty of people who find the status quo unacceptable.

Among them are Alberta’s former auditor general, Merwan Saher. The province has no plan to achieve class size targets, doesn’t track how school boards spend class-size initiative funds, and hasn’t analyzed why K-3 class sizes never hit the provincial target, Saher wrote in a February 2018 report.

Telling school boards to report only average class sizes “obscures” the number of classes that have met targets, he wrote. Some districts with more than half of their class sizes higher than provincial guidelines still met the government’s average goal.

“Albertans may feel misled, because the ministry budget gives the impression that the minister and department continue to focus on achieving K-3 class-size averages through specific targeted funding,” Saher wrote.

He recommended the education ministry develop an action plan to achieve class-size targets and monitor how school boards spend class-size funding.

When told of Postmedia’s data showing that 78 to 91 per cent of K-3 classes exceed commission guidelines in six of the province’s largest school districts, former learning minister Oberg said it made him angry.

Alberta Commission on Learning chairwoman Patricia Mackenzie, pictured in 2003 on the day the panel published its high-profile report into classroom conditions, said parents’ concerns about class sizes made the issue a top priority.Rick MacWilliam /
Postmedia file

“That’s crazy,” said Oberg, who has two daughters working as Alberta teachers. “That was the reason why we did the commission on learning, was to put in some recommendations for the system. You shouldn’t just simply be able to throw those aside because 15 years have passed. You don’t throw the Canada Health Act aside because 30 years have passed.”

Said commission chairwoman Mackenzie: “I’m very surprised, and somewhat shocked, to have that many above average. That means class sizes have really, really grown.”

ATA president Jeffery said it’s clear the hundreds of millions of dollars allocated annually to reduce class sizes are not reaching classrooms.

Calgary parent Barbara Silva, who is communications director for public education advocacy group Support Our Students, said she was “horrified” by the newly revealed class-size data.

She questions whether any hands-on learning can happen in science classes with more than 40 students, or how a Grade 3 teacher in Red Deer could adequately give 32 eight- and nine-year olds the individual attention they require.

Are you a teacher? A parent? A student? We’d like to hear what your classrooms have been like in recent years. How many kids? How many teachers and educational assistants were in the room? How did educators and students make it work? Share your class size encounters with education reporter Janet French by email at jfrench@postmedia.com.

School buses line up outside a northeast Calgary school waiting to take students home in a 2014 photo.Stuart Dryden /
Stuart Dryden/Calgary Sun/QMI Agency

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